


so much at stake (oh! bad choice of word)

by softestpink



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood and Gore, Bonding, Drama, F/F, F/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:15:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23461612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestpink/pseuds/softestpink
Summary: Iris fights herself and time and the body that controls her and the blood that lures her, but never him.She never can seem to fight him.
Relationships: Barry Allen/Iris West, Cecile Horton/Joe West, Felicity Smoak/Linda Park, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 17
Kudos: 62





	so much at stake (oh! bad choice of word)

**Author's Note:**

> yes it’s me. back on my bullshit. i started writing this in october (yikes)

As far as she knows Iris is raised in a traditional dhampir household, which means teeth tucked and no scenting. Modest, closed-mouth nodding when she’s excited. Carefully manicured nails with blunted tips. Clothes that leave no room for the sun to peek through to her skin. Long gloves and chic little umbrellas for day trips with Barry to the ice cream shop or his mother’s grave. When he moves in, Iris throws a fit to be transferred from empty, lonely, night school to daylight classes with him. Joe only relents after Barry promises to stop running away and Iris swears to have recess inside of school. They’re inseparable no matter the hour.

There is only one rule that they never break, despite the rumors that start to circulate in their junior year of high school.

One rule.

Iris never, ever,  _ ever _ bites Barry.

He is off-limits and has been ever since he stepped foot in the West home, so when Angela Kapattafi shyly asks her what it’s like to feed from someone she’s known for so long, Iris goes a little off the rails. She splutters at first and  _ then  _ snipes that she’s actually not an animal- she can resist eating her best friend, thank you very much. She’s not the only night student attending day classes, though most others are only there for extra-curriculars, so she expects an uproar about the suggestion that she’s chewing Barry up behind closed doors or whatever.

But no one seems to care.

In fact, if anything the other three vampires that attend her school are a little friendlier to her after word gets around.

It’s an especially unhelpful time for her to be going through what Iris dubs ‘vampire puberty’.

Barry shoots up to six feet in the summer of their junior year. Iris develops venom in the beginning of their senior year.

She can’t decide which is worse.

He’s  _ ecstatic _ about finally being taller than her. Barry takes every chance he can get to put an elbow on her shoulder and lean on Iris and say dumb,  _ unfunny  _ things like “oh, I didn’t even see you there”. He stretches and she sees his waistline, sees the veins running just under the skin of his hipbones. And none of his pants fit quite right anymore so she’s always seeing his bony ankles. And worst of all, he starts dating  _ Becky Cooper _ , who comments on how  **_tall_ ** and  **_cute_ ** Barry is now all the time.

The venom thing is just as much of a surprise as it is an inconvenience. The first time Barry stands at Iris’ locker and looms over her cheerfully, her mouth just gets weirdly wet and sweet and she thinks she’s getting sick. It’s not spit. It’s syrupy and drips from somewhere behind her incoming wisdom teeth. She feels gross all of a sudden and leaves school early to call her dad and ask if he can schedule her a doctors’ appointment.

She’s never gotten sick before.

Barry panics and leaves with her when he figures out she’s not feeling well, ignoring Becky’s cloying whines about how he better not be gone long. He insists on driving her even though she always complains that he drives like an old person and he holds her gloved hand while Iris keeps her mouth shut and tries to ignore her aching gums and the wetness filling it in small bursts. 

By the time she sees a doctor, they can’t find anything wrong. She’s perfectly healthy by human standards. It’s an anomaly for a couple of months. And then her dad gives her some pamphlets that explain it all and Iris ends up with her knees to her chest while she sits at the dinner table covering her face while he gives her The Talk.

Her toxin glands coming in are a sign of a kind of secondary puberty that young dhampirs undergo. The reason her mouth keeps flooding is that she’s horny or hungry or angry and her body is instinctively translating her excited state as a need to feed. 

“So your body thinks you’re hunting-“ her dad says awkwardly and Iris just wants to die.

Thankfully, Barry got politely kicked out for this entire talk, so she doesn’t have to deal with the added embarrassment of an audience.

Iris doesn’t really think about her mom often, but in times like these she bitterly wishes that woman could’ve had the grace to stick around and actually raise her half-breed daughter. 

Because then maybe Iris wouldn’t be holding a pamphlet with the words **_Gums Swollen? Mouth Tingly? Congratulations! You’re Toxic!_** scrawled across the front.

Like always, Iris adjusts to the new development and keeps her reactions in check. Her gums stop hurting. She stops nearly drooling every time her heartrate increases. She keeps control.

Everything changes when they’re older.

Iris goes off to college to study journalism and meets her own kind. Other vampires. There are new social rules she hadn’t even known existed. She makes friends. She cuts down the amount of day classes she attends. And most distractingly:

Iris bites someone for the first time.

She’s not a total freak; she’s had blood before. She still needs it to sustain herself and all that. But it’s her first time not heating up a half-empty glass of old, donated B plus to choke down at 5am. It’s her first time biting. 

The feeling is nearly indescribable.

Iris’ first bite nearly drives her out of her mind. She’s at a party. There are people with bite marks littering their fingers and wrists and cleavage in some cases. Her new friend Lena tells her she doesn’t have to try it, but if she’s never fed from a living person she’s in for an incredible awakening.

Lena’s right. 

His name is Eddie and he’s a criminal justice major. He doesn’t have as many marks as a lot of the people around her, but still more than Iris ever saw on a person in her quiet little neighborhood growing up. She chickens out of asking him, initially.

Instead, he offers.

“You want a taste, don’t you? I don’t mind.” he rolls up the forearm of his long-sleeved shirt and Iris is tipsy on Lena’s dom perrignon already so she avoids looking him in the eye and says “well, okay.”

Eddie is warm. Warm in a way that a microwave can’t replicate. His blood tastes like all blood. Like copper but with the added taste of salty-sweet skin. It’s so  _ warm  _ is the thing. He’s so alive under her. She almost feels- it’s a pseudo-closeness. The same warmth she usually associates with being drunk and full and happy. Iris sucks on the wrist he puts up to her mouth and she can feel Eddie’s heart beating with every sip.

When he adjusts underneath her, Iris twitches and clutches him tighter on instinct. He’s prey. He’s all hers. 

Electricity creeps up her spine. He’s so alive and she could swallow him whole. 

She’s starting to understand how this could become addictive.

He has to pry her off because she’s loose and still tipsy and not really monitoring herself. Iris apologizes when she sees how he stumbles.

A part of her wants to wrench him back under her mouth. To suck him up until there’s nothing left and she’s blissfully full and hot to the touch. That part of her wants to be done with him on her own terms.

She lets him go. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Are you okay? I can get you some water? Oh, let me stop the bleeding.” She makes for the kitchen to grab a handtowel, but he stops her gently with a tired smile.

“Wow. You really haven’t done this before. You can close the wound. Use your saliva.”

Iris must make a face, because he laughs.

“This is nasty.” she protests before she quickly grabs his wrist and spits on the punctures. 

He’s still giggling at her as she watches the wounds close in awe. Barry would lose his shit if he saw something like that in real time.

“That was nice.” Eddie tells her.

“Before or after I spit on you?”

“I’d say all of it was pretty great. I’m not sure how often you feed but if you ever want to try that again- well. Consider me interested.”

Iris can’t believe he’s into this. He’s acting like she’s sexy and not dripping blood onto a top she borrowed from Lena. Iris is itching to clean up. Her chin feels wet and her fangs are still extended, digging into her bottom lip. It gives her a lisp that probably isn’t helping her image.

She is barely resisting the urge to lick her own chin right now.

“You... really liked that?” she asks skeptically. She’s trying to focus. To not close her eyes and swallow down the last of him like a fine wine.

Eddie takes a swig from his plastic cup. 

“Full transparency?” His eyes are still a little hazy. “You rocked my world a little bit just now. And I’d be happy to show you the ropes for this kind of thing. Umm. Not that I’m, you know, making that decision for you. But. Yeah.”

Iris tilts her head, considering. She can’t tell if it’s a bad idea. Of course the part of her that’s still reeling from the taste of him is screaming for joy in her head, but she knows better. 

She shrugs. 

“Okay. I want to be careful with you, though. I know I probably took more than I was supposed to, tonight.”

Eddie nods. 

“We’ll work on it.”

She doesn’t call Eddie at first. Iris thinks it’s a one-off. He was probably drunk. She was tipsy. He didn’t mean it. She has enough control to keep to her normal diet. Just because she’s learning all these new social norms and what all these other vampires do- it doesn’t change anything. She doesn’t bite. She’s safe to be around.

So she doesn’t call.

And then she becomes obsessed. Sometimes, she thinks she can smell it. Eddie’s blood. Or maybe blood in general.

So she starts, tentatively, drinking live.

She doesn’t tell Barry about it at first. She isn’t sure why, but she’s nervous to talk about it with him. Like, what if he thinks about her letting go- ripping into people and draining them and decides she’s no better than an animal or one of the strigoi that make the nightly news for butchering people late at night.

She drinks from a couple strangers at the club. Never from the neck, because she doesn’t trust herself and plus it’s vulnerable to be tucked up against someone like that.

It makes her sick sometimes, depending on the person. A heady sick that ends with her running into the next stall after and vomiting up her last three meals along with several pints of whoever she last drank.

Lena worries about her, she knows. She often suggests that they hunt together, but Iris hates thinking of it that way. Hunting. She also hates the thought of anyone she knows seeing her like that. Rabid. Feral. Out of her mind with bloodlust. 

But the feeling of drinking live- it’s almost perfect. There’s something, not missing, but something more that it could be. She can feel it. She can almost taste it.

It starts making Iris sad. She’s always been someone that knows what she needs. Someone able to exercise self control. This isn’t control.

By winter break, she’s stopped feeding entirely. She only eats solid, human meals now and it makes her feel hollow and weak and half of who she is. Her roommate Felicity tells her that she’s the most uptight vampire she’s ever met and she’s dating  _ Oliver _ , so that’s saying something. 

“You need to realize that what you are is natural.” Linda tells her bluntly. She’s strigoi- like Lena. Like Kara.

Iris is the only half-breed among them, but they seem to treat it as a novelty rather than the annoyance Iris dreaded. She’s noticed that her fangs are a little less defined than theirs. Sharp but not deadly. And they delight in her limited ability to withstand sunlight. She starts to cook in the daylight after a good while, instead of mere moments like them. 

Iris huffs and rolls her eyes. 

“I know it’s natural.” 

They are cuddled up because the strigoi love to curl around her. Iris is used to being the coldest one in the room at all times, but Lena and Linda tease that she’s pretty much a warmblood. It’s some kind of miracle to them. They delight in curling around her and coaxing her to sleep in a pile together. It’s good for coven bonding. At least that’s what Kara tells her, not that Iris would know any differently. She’s never had a coven.

“I’m serious.” Linda says, stroking her hair. “You should talk to Kara. Or one of the night counselors here.”

“Those are for the forcibly Turned.”

“Not only.” 

“You think I’m ‘uptight’ because I was born infected.” Iris pushes, stubborn.

“I think you’re uptight because you were raised by a human and you use words like ‘infected’.”

Kara is the oldest of them, but Linda is the one who acts like it even if she’s still quite young by strigoi standards. She was bitten, but it wasn’t the way Lena was bitten. Linda doesn’t like to talk about it. 

Iris wonders if she’s been to counseling herself.

She picks at her knit dress. Thinking about her... condition is a headache, but she knows she has to come to terms with what she is someday. It’s making her depressed- the back and forth between Good and Bad. Hungry and drunk. 

“I hate it” she admits. “I hate how good it feels to feed. And I hate how it must look. And how it feels when I’m not in control. I’m not an animal, Linda. I’m a person.” 

Linda is firmer in stroking her hair. 

“You are.” she confirms. “You  _ are _ a person. And there is a middle ground. You need someone solid.” Linda rubs her hand between the two of hers. “I’m not saying you should bond or anything. But having someone you trust to feed you and see you like that would help.” 

Her first thought is an absolutely forbidden one. Barry. She imagines sitting in his lap, arms and legs coiled around him like a like a spider- no, like a lover. Biting him. Letting him fill her up until she’s warm and swollen and hazy on his blood. Iris slams a mental door on the idea. Bad. Wrong. It wouldn’t work for a lot of reasons. 

Someone else, then. 

She calls Eddie. 

She explains her situation, letting him know point-blank that he can say no if he isn’t comfortable with someone like her- someone with little to no experience, feeding from him on the regular. He accepts. Eagerly. It’s a marvel and a little bit of an ego boost for her. 

Lena, obviously happy that Iris has found a new arrangement, advises her to never bite Eddie when she’s already feeling emotional. 

“Think of drinking like casual sex. You add in emotions and then things get complicated.”

Iris is not going to start thinking about this thing with Eddie like casual sex. But she understands.

To be safe she reigns herself in when they start. Iris only calls him once a month, when she can feel her jaws aching and her throat drying no matter how much water she chugs. 

Even when she does bite him, they sit apart politely and she holds his wrist like a dainty teacup at a child’s birthday party.

She can tell it isn’t what he was expecting, the way they do things. She’s probably being totally weird and formal about all of this. Iris has only been to a few of Lena’s bloodnights but every time she’s watched someone else feed, they’ve been tangled up in their victim.

The closeness is addicting.

Iris wants control. She wants to be responsible.

So they settle into a routine. She comes over. There is polite small talk. She sets a timer for three minutes. She feeds. She leaves. Rinse and repeat at one week intervals. 

Barry finds out, because of course he finds out. Cisco lets it slip when they’re all out. His girlfriend is Cynthia and Iris has seen them together at a few blood parties. He has a big mouth. Iris would cut him the dirtiest look if she wasn’t busy studying the micro-expressions on Barry’s face. She hasn’t seen him in so long and he’s here now and  _ this  _ is what they’re talking about. Her diet. 

“Oh, wow.” Barry says, clearly surprised. “I mean I guess I knew you’d start drinking from people one day. ‘Cause, well, no offense but that plastic bag that Joe used to give you has always looked super gross. Not, like, gross because it’s blood but gross because- well even if I was a vampire I wouldn’t want that. You used to pour it into your mug on movie night and I would be like, ‘oh my god, this is depressing’.” 

He’s rambling. 

Which means he’s nervous about something. It makes Iris nervous, too. She laughs shrilly to cover it and Cisco looks between the two of them like he’s watching a nature documentary. 

“I guess? It’s not bad. I mean- well I didn’t know the difference. And then I started having, you know,” Iris taps her wrist because it’s  _ so  _ embarrassing that they’re talking about this. 

Barry traces the lip of his beer with a thumb. 

“How does it taste?” he asks. Iris licks her lips. She wasn’t expecting him to ask. 

“Umm. You really want to know?” 

He nods.

Iris isn’t a poet but she wants to tell him it tastes like life coming in at the mouth. Like victory, the kind that the first people must’ve had when they discovered fire. Her mouth is watering now. Her gums ache just thinking about him. Not even thinking about biting him. Just talking to him about what it feels like to feed. 

“It’s really good.” is all she says. 

He nods.

“So will you, you know, bond now?”

Everyone knows about bonding. Everyone’s seen the magazines detailing hundred-year-old bonded couples’ lifestyles and watched romantic comedies about thousand year old lovers getting amnesia and re-finding each other.

Iris wrinkles her nose.

“Not if I can help it.”

Barry frowns.

“Besides,” she says while digging through his fries and picking the greasiest ones. “It’s actually a lot harder to bond than most people think.”

Another thing she’s learned since leaving home.

“Oh?” Barry looks interested.

“Yeah, dude.” Cisco puts in. “Cynthia is, like, commitment-phobic on the  _ best _ of days, my guy, and when I brought up the idea of us bonding she was like. Not even worried. Apparently not everyone’s able to. There’s no exact science. And it takes, like, a long ass time to get it right.”

“It is a good while.” Iris confirms. “And if I wanted to, I’d have to let someone feed from me. Can you imagine me shoving my neck in someone’s mouth like- ‘oh, this is cool! Just eat my blood! No need for a good line when I can shoot my shot in the grossest way possible’.”

“Drinking your blood wouldn’t be gross.” Barry says abruptly, brow furrowed.

His arms are folded and his eyes are darting all over her, taking her in. Iris pats her hair self-consciously. Her face is warm.

“Yeah, well, says you. You’re into weird stuff. Like cold potstickers. And films from before they started shooting in color.”

“HA!” Cisco laughs around a mouth full of jalapeno peppers. “Remember that time we walked in on him watching Sound of Music 

“I do fun stuff! I’m cool!”

“Bear, I love you but maybe don’t say those words in front of anyone ever.”

“Whatever.” he sulks. “I was gonna offer myself up since you’ve got living people on the menu now, but you’re being mean to me so you won’t be getting a taste of this.”

Iris inhales so fast she coughs and chokes on her Sprite.

“Sorry. Wrong pipe.”

Barry rubs her back and his fingers feel long and capable between her shoulder blades. So capable. Just full of. Ability.

Iris laughs at nothing and tucks some of her hair behind her ear.

“You good?” Barry asks. Iris nods and looks him up and down, distracted.

He’s just wearing his plaid and Dad Jeans.

Her jaw aches and her mouth feels familiarly wet.

“Help.” she tells Linda later that morning. “I think I have some kind of weird vamp-crush on my childhood best friend.” 

“Mmhmgfmmdfm.” Linda mumbles, swatting at her. It’s six am. Iris is really cutting it close.

“Not a vamp thing.” she murmurs into her bedding and then hisses when Iris swats at her some more and keeps whining.

It’s all she’ll say.

It is a  _ something,  _ though. Because Iris thinks about it all the time. 

Barry hasn’t come over yet, but she thinks- what if he did? What if he came over in the middle of the night and stayed through the morning and day, tucked up against her in her sleeping coffin.

She has one of those now. Iris had thought Lena was joking when she told her that she should get one. Apparently vampires sleeping better in enclosed spaces isn’t a myth. Something to do with instinct and their ancestors living underground. Some of them are fine with beds, like Linda, but Iris sleeps like the dead in her little glass box. Total peace. 

It was a gift from Kara. Something old from her family treasure trove that she never used and thought Iris was like. She was right. There are delicate white flowers painted on the sides and a velvet lining that feels like heaven on her skin when she sleeps. Her pillow is red silk. Very classy. 

Anyway, the idea of Barry stuffed in close with her, while she’s vulnerable and sleepy and handing her his wrist. Just to nip a little, just to taste while she drifts off, like a mug of tea before bed. 

_ Why are you holding back? _ , this Dream Barry asks her. 

Iris lets her hand drift down as she lays and closes her eyes and for  _ once _ indulges herself.

He would give her his wrist. And he would watch her, like lean over her and look at her mouth stretch open around him because Barry is notoriously curious about everything. He would pay attention to her fangs. Probably say something sciencey about how developed her canines were compared to homo-neanderthalus or something. 

Something boring and innocuous and only sexy because it’s coming out of his mouth _. _

_ Yeah,  _ her dream Barry grunts and relaxes into her.  _ Take what you need. _ He’d let her suck him down slow and sweet and careful, because she’d never hurt him. Of course not.

Iris exhales and moves her fingers lower, lower. 

She’s just wet enough that her panties are starting to stick. Iris imagines her mouth full. Unable to speak. Filled with him. His life pooling on her tongue and in her cheeks because he wants her to have it. Because he wants to  _ give  _ it. She breathes out again, clenching her thighs together around her hand.

He would, wouldn’t he? 

Give himself? 

_ You know I would _ , Dream Barry rolls his eyes and takes his wrist away from her mouth to kiss at her lips. 

_ N-no. _ Iris would start to say, ashamed and aware of how feral she looks, and Barry would lick up the blood slipping down her cheek anyway because he’s still. So. Curious. 

And Iris wouldn’t be able to help grind against him. Him long and heavy over her, letting her thighs squeeze and shake against him while he cleaned up her mess. 

_ Is this what does it for you, Iris? You losing control and me letting you? You want to slip up, don’t you? I can handle it. Let go. _

Iris gasps and tastes the hot air- it tastes like blood, like herself. She imagines the smell of Barry. 

_ I said  _ **_let go_ ** _ , Iris.  _

She does, clawing at the ornate lid of her coffin with one hand while the other works between her thighs until she cries. 

Iris covers her face, mortified once she realizes she just got off to the thought of riding Bartholomew Henry Allen’s thigh while he licks his own blood off her chin. Linda’s wrong. 

There is definitely something going on here. 

  
  
  


Cutting herself off entirely wasn’t the best idea, Iris can admit once she finds herself wobbling in her heels on her way to a journalism conference with Linda and Lena. She’s started carrying a 10-pack of Carmex with her because she swears her lips start to crack every two minutes. 

She’s about to meet bigwig names that she’s dreamed about since she was 10 years old and cutting newspaper clippings out for her  **MY DREAM JOB** collage in summer camp. She’s nervous- more nervous than she’s ever been for a conference. Iris plays with her hair, braiding it and then unbraiding it, fiddling with the limo’s controls, tapping a staccato beat on her clutch as they enter. 

Lena looks at her like she’s about to break when they get inside. And then she looks at Linda with a face that says- 

‘ _ Linda, girl, Iris is about to  _ **_break_ ** _. _ ’

And then Linda looks back at her with a face that says- 

‘ _ Lena, girl, I _ **_know_ ** _. _ ’

She ignores them and shivers even though there’s warm air blowing through the entrance. She’s just going through an adjustment period. Cold turkey isn’t good but it’s better than before. 

She pretends that she can’t feel Vicki Vale’s heartbeat when they hug as she crows that she hasn’t seen Iris in “for **_ever_ ** , oh my god, girl!” 

She pretends that her knees aren’t shaking when she when the main speaker gets up and starts signing to the crowd. Cat Grant is a legend, in her eyes at least. A second-generation Vietnamese immigrant writer that lost her voice after being attacked by a feral vampire and then wrote an article that hit everyone in Central City like a bag of bricks. Iris has it framed- a piece on how the world only started caring about this girl after she was maimed by a monster. How she was faceless and fine enough to exploit when she was just brown and poor with a heavy accent. How no one listened to her or her mother or her brothers until she couldn’t use her mouth to talk anymore. 

Iris has the last lines of that article memorized. 

**_‘It is interesting to me how this brutality is a public shame, but the silencing I endured from the day I stepped onto American soil is fine. At least the vampire had the decency to leave my family out of it.’_ **

Cat starts the address with the fact that her name is actually not Cat. It was just easier in grade school to change it from Hoa Thanh to something American kids could pronounce. By the time she starts speaking about the attack, Iris is biting down on her bottom lip so hard that she can feel wetness escaping down her chin, but she can’t- she can’t breathe. It hits her that what she’s feeling is hunger. She’s so hungry she can’t breathe. Iris tries not to inhale too hard, because everything smells  _ more _ . It’s like her nose is seeking blood. She fears opening her mouth. 

She watches Cat move her hands artfully and can’t focus on a word she’s saying. Her wrists are meaty and full. Iris is going to be sick. 

She politely puts a hand over her mouth and Kara is the one that catches the movement. She’d been busy staring in awe at Miss Grant, but when she looks at Iris her face changes. She whispers something to Linda- something Iris doesn’t catch because she’s busy sniffing at her own wrist and imagining the possibility. 

Maybe she could have a taste of herself. 

Would it hurt so much? Why shouldn’t she? What’s so taboo about feeding from a live source if she’s the only one involved? 

And she wouldn’t be hurting anyone else if she-

Linda gently pulls her own arm away from her mouth and pats her cheeks. Iris feels weightless and sweaty. When did Kara pick her up? 

“Come on, Iris. Come on.” 

“ _ Fuck _ . We can’t take her home like this. We’re going to the hospital.” 

“We can’t take her to the hospital! Look at her! She’s half-feral!” 

The words make Iris curl in on herself. Feral. Her worst nightmare. She can’t really process anything but the feeling of her own blood in her veins. Even Kara’s hold on her is a faraway dream. Blood. Blood is all she can think about. She thinks about Eddie. She thinks about finding him and ripping him up until there’s nothing left. Until all that was him is her and she never feels empty again. 

Her vision swims. 

“What about that one guy? The tall white guy with, like, the tragic backstory that she was getting down with?” 

“ _ Barry _ ?”

“What? No! The one guy- umm- Eddie! That’s his name!” 

“Oh, do you think she has his number saved?” 

Iris just needs to rest her eyes for a moment.

“We are not taking her to a hospital.” Kara interrupts in that voice she only gets sometimes. It’s one that brokers no argument and reminds everyone that she is the oldest in the room. 

“I’ve seen what happens to our kind in traditional hospitals. And we can’t risk Eddie. Even if she doesn’t kill him, he’ll be damaged or he’ll tell someone and campus security might get involved.”

A cool hand touches her forehead and Iris leans into it, needing comfort. Everything is too hot and too dry. Too empty. Her stomach curls and her teeth dig into her lip curving until she can feel herself gnawing on her own lips. A hand wedges between her lips to stop her. 

“We need someone she’ll recognize enough to inspire a modicum of control.” 

“We could call her father?” 

“The police officer that raised her as a human? I don’t think so.” 

“Someone just **_call_** Barry.” That’s Lena’s voice. 

Iris feels all wrong. She wants to sleep. She also wants to eat and never stop. It feels wrong in her gut and right everywhere else. 

The next thing she can remember is warmth all around her. Not the bad kind, she doesn’t feel overheated anymore. So different from Kara’s cold strength. Warmth- and something soft teasing her lips, something with a pulse that makes her open her mouth and sigh when the smell of copper floods her nostrils. 

‘I know this’, she thinks dizzily. ‘I know this smell.’ 

She also knows the feeling that it evokes. 

Good to rub her face against. Good to sniff. She tightens around the heat and runs her lips over it and wishes she could break the rules. 

“Come on, Iris. You can do it.” 

Her mouth feels wet. 

It’s not the wetness that she wants. 

She opens her mouth and licks tentatively. 

Just a taste.

Iris opens wider and feels her teeth ache and sharpen even more. Just once. Just this once.

He tastes- he tastes  _ so _ \- 

“That’s it. There you go.” 

Barry. This is Barry. Iris’ eyebrows crumple as she unscrambles her mind. She’s in his lap like a bride, draped over him with her head leaned against his shoulder and his wrist cradled against her mouth. This is absolutely forbidden, what she’s doing. Barry is off-limits. 

She pulls away and licks her own lips, rubs at her cheeks and licks her fingers, sucks down to the knuckles, licks at his arm to clean him up where he’s still leaking blood sweetly. She wants to stop and apologize, but she  _ can’t _ . 

She’s just so  _ hungry _ . 

“Please, please, please-” she hears herself over the throb of her own heart. This is the fastest it’s ever beaten.

“You can have more, come on Iris.” he cajoles and Iris turns and sobs against his chest.

“Please, please.” He smells so good. She  _ can’t _ . 

There is Barry- good and warm and here with her now. An ocean of skin and life coaxing her into a content pleasure. 

And then there is her mother in her mind- a figure feeding without remorse, sucking the life from anyone she could get her hands on, out of control. 

“I can’t” Iris says, because she starts feeling like she can. He is making her feel like she can. 

The rule is in place for a reason. 

“I can control myself.” Iris says, “I can- I can-” 

Barry puts his bleeding arm against her mouth again. He smells like a trap. She tightens her lips. 

“Iris.” he says, firm. “You are not out of control. You need to eat.” 

He sits her up a little and turns her face up toward his. Iris wants to hide in his shirt. No one has ever seen her like this. She doesn’t  _ want  _ to be known like this. 

But Barry is looking at her red eyes that are afraid and her cracked lips and her dangerous teeth and the venom and blood smearing her cheeks. 

He is looking and all she can see on his face is love. 

“You trust me, right?”

Iris nods minutely. 

“Then trust that I know my limits. And that I know you. You are not out of control. You need to eat.” 

And he seems so right and final that even though she hesitates when he presses his wrist to her mouth again, she still presses in with her teeth. He grunts, because it must hurt. It can’t not. He’s a human with an average pain tolerance. 

But he doesn’t move away from her. He cups the back of her head instead. 

Iris tries to go slow and soothe the ache with her tongue when she can. To make it good for him the way it is for her. He can’t know what it feels like, to take from him like this. It’s like floating. It’s like a dream. 

“I-Iris.” he sighs, and Iris tries to pull herself out of the trance of him. Barry slips back further into the couch. His legs spread, lax and long, and she has to change the way she’s sitting to stay with him. 

“Here, do it here.” he’s saying, trying to guide her. 

She unlatches herself. Painfully. And his blood runs down the sides of her mouth like the sweetest drink. 

He’s pulled his button-up collar to the side and invited her to his neck. Iris groans. 

Fuck. 

She’s really trying to keep this as far away from sexual as she can, but it’s  _ Barry  _ and her thing for him is colliding with the way he’s spreading himself open and asking her to climb on him and take his neck the way she wants. 

She does it gently, or as gently as she can anyway. 

He melts around her fangs like butter, skin pliant and soft. His neck alone feels good in her mouth, solid enough for her to mouth at pleasantly and smooth enough for the sensation to be pleasant. 

“Oh, fuck.” Barry breathes. 

Iris closes her eyes and lets herself go. All she knows is the feel of his hand on the back of her head. She huffs and feels a familiar slickness coming from her own mouth. She’s poisoning him. 

Barry passes out about an hour and a half into the feeding process. He put up a good fight, but Iris is too hungry and he slips under. It looks like Barry is susceptible to her venom-  _ very  _ susceptible. Eddie had once told her that her venom was like NyQuil to him. The second after she left his apartment he was usually knocked out on his couch with a good book in his lap. This is different. 

Barry enters a sort of thrall before he sleeps, one that lasts for about an hour and isn’t very eventful but still worries Iris anyway. She’s still trying to wrestle control of herself after she’s done feeding and ends up licking him. A lot. He spends the entirety of it kind of humming off-key and stroking her hair and any part of her he can reach while she cleans him up, embarrassed of herself. He only speaks clearly twice- once to ask her if she’s okay now and once to ask her if it’s ‘cool if they cuddle’. She says yes to both and the soft cheeriness of his smile makes her want to say yes to anything he asks. 

“Awesome.” he tells her and then he goes back to humming while he tugs her close. Iris gets swallowed up between him and the couch before she realizes that what he’s trying to sing is ‘ _ Love On The Brain _ ’. He’s so doped up. 

It would scare Iris if she hadn’t seen Felicity under thrall several times before. 

“Are you sure it’s alright?” she asks her friend later. “Barry was so out of it. He just kept mumbling and smiling and looking lost.” 

“Oh, he was having a great time.” Felicity says. They’re in her apartment and Iris is watching her piece together some kind of high tech data pad. “Trust me. Linda doesn’t put me under often, because I’m like,  _ always  _ talking- which she likes it for some reason.” Her nose turns pink. 

“But she says when I’m in thrall I’m too quiet and she misses the chatter. Which I guess is a defining factor- but back to Barry. The thrall is a kind of- hmm, I’d definitely compare it to being high. Except the comedown can be a motherfucker if you don’t have any food in you. Your venom isn’t poisonous to him, which is a total win, because people usually have to get tested for that sort of thing before they bite the bullet and try. My God, when Linda took us to get tested she was totally freaking out, I could tell. You know how she’s all Cool Girl Doesn’t Care? MYTH! Anyway some couples never introduce venom into their feeding time because it will damage the human partner’s arteries and other important stuff- I’ve gotta read up on it again. You’re really lucky that Barry wasn’t affected negatively.”

Iris listens to her friend and slaps a hand over her face, lying over plastic and steel pieces on Felicity’s small bed. 

She could’ve hurt Barry. She already feels guilty about feeding on him in the first place. That had been an absolutely  _ forbidden  _ concept for so long. She’s still worried about her father finding out. 

Felicity reads the misery on her face. 

“No no no.” She says, pulling at Iris’ wrists. “Don’t feel bad, I promise it’s the most amazing feeling in the world for him. Another reason Linda doesn’t use her venom that often is because it feels so good that it’s basically like crack for me. Well, I guess weed would be a better comparison. I’m serious. There’s nothing like a Saturday afternoon bite that puts me under until Sunday evening. It’s my favorite de-stresser.” 

“So you aren’t... scared when you’re in that state? Like you don’t ever think that you’re helpless? Or Linda could hurt you?” 

Felicity thinks. 

“Nah. If anything I’m clingy as hell and she’s the one that has to put up with me being all over her. She also has to make sure that I don’t accidentally hurt myself. I wouldn’t call myself graceful at the best of times.”

Iris remembers the way that Barry hadn’t wanted to let go of her after. 

The way she’d thought she was crushing him until she tried to move and he’d grumbled and clutched her tighter. They’ve talked since... The Incident because Barry refused to let her wallow in self-loathing after drinking him. Neither of them bring up the boner he popped or the way Iris kept panting in his ear and licking up what she could from his neck and collar bones after they were done. 

They’ve agreed on two things. 

  1. Iris will drink from Barry once a week. 
  2. Neither of them can ever, _ever_ tell her father. 



**Author's Note:**

> i will try to update at least twice a month i swear, yall


End file.
